'If the left one don't get you, then . . .'

I was going through some old papers recently, and I found two pages from the Daily Mail of March 13, 2008, featuring an article headed, Sexual Predator or a Victim? It was to do with the matter of Cathal O’Searcaigh, which was causing much hand-wringing in cultural circles at the time. Had he been an ordinary poor hoor of no particular talent then the verdict would have been immediate and damning. As it was, because of his fashionable homosexuality, and the fact that he was also a poet, the matter caused a certain indecision amongst those members of the chattering classes who in other circumstances would have been only too willing to jerk the knee.

The article consisted of opinion pieces by different media personalities. One segment was by Philip Nolan, described as an author and journalist, who went on to say of O’Searcaigh: ‘He is not a paedophile, because each of the boys was over sixteen, the age of sexual consent in Nepal.’

This immediately provokes the surreal, but not at all absurd, picture of someone forearmed with a schedule of international sexual legislation and a flexible travel plan being able to pick his or her steps from country to country without ever falling foul of the law. While at the same time, your common or garden blunderer, pursuing exactly the same course, but in a less organized way, could well find himself locked up in some local clink and internationally demonized as a paedophile.

The meaning of terms such as paedophile cannot depend on the vagaries of legislation if such terms are to have any rational use. To raise things truly to the level of the absurd . . . if the government was to decide overnight to raise the age of consent to, say, twenty-five—something in itself not necessarily that absurd, in that, for example, Adler put the upper limit of adolescence somewhere around the age of twenty; Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff at twenty-five—then they could put the whole country in jail.

But, of course, this is to miss the point. The word ‘paedophile’ is one of those words whose use would only be hampered by too close a definition. It is no longer primarily a rational term, but rather a means of abuse. In its current usage it is akin to the daub of paint on the door of those to be killed during a pogrom or a yellow star on the coat of a Jew during the war.

A sure sign that a word has left the confines of the dictionary and become lodged in the viscera—especially if it is a complicated word—is the extent that it becomes second nature in the mouths of those who in other circumstances would find it hard to spell ‘bus’.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Every age and every political system has had a need for meaningfully sounding but conveniently vague catchphrases as a way of dealing with its perceived enemies and distracting the populace. It’s just the way things are . . .

But at least we have the assurance that Cathal O’Searcaigh is not a paedophile.

But just when you might think he was out of the frying pan, along comes Terry Prone, in the same article, to put him instead into the fire: ‘The problem is that a sexual relationship with a much younger person does not have to be physically coercive in order to be abusive. Having sex with these young men when he is so important to their continued health, livelihood and even existence is wrong—because it cannot be between equals. Coercion takes many forms, not all of them violent.’

Now it is clear here that, at least implicitly, Prone accepts that O’Searcaigh’s behaviour was not paedophilic. But she still wants to have another bite at the cherry and express her disapproval in a different way. And quite possibly she is right. But the thing that fascinated me at the time was the way in which this argument was likely to be used as a stalking horse for the entry of the ‘equality agenda’ into the whole matter of sexual relations.

Prone, of course, put it in best case format, speaking of ‘sexual relationship with a much younger person’. Now the first point to make is that this would obviously be a person above the age of consent. The second is the old saying that ‘hard cases make bad law’.

Now, of course, law is not involved here—at least for the moment. It is more in the matter of a moral stance—implicitly a moral stance with teeth. But where public pronouncements of morality go, especially in relation to controversial matters, the law is often not far behind.

And even in relation to arriving at moral judgements, it is worth reading between the lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing though he was in relation to law: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment."

The other point is the sheer relentlessness of the equality agenda, the weapon that is being used more than any other to unpick the current fabric of society. Give it a toehold in any situation and, like the beggar on horseback, it will ride to the devil.

Now Prone made her argument with some finesse, but that was not the case with some of the incidental commentators on the controversy, many of whom seemed hardwired to the pursuit of maximum equality.

It was with this in mind, rather than specifically Prone’s contribution, that I wrote the following letter to the Irish Times. Of course, it wasn’t published. Mercifully so, because it is a bad letter—crass and vulgar. But then it was meant to be so—for it was intended to be provocative.

It also implicitly involved a sideswipe at the hypocrisy of the politically correct—ever ready to condemn ‘sex predators’ (whatever they be?) and ‘inequality’ on the one hand, while queuing up at the Square to cheer Bill Clinton on the other.

Dear Editor.

Let me say at the outset that I have not seen the documentary nor followed the controversy or correspondence in the press. But that being said, you would want to be deaf, dumb and blind not to become at least peripherally aware of it.

The thing that interests me is not what Cathal O Searcaigh did or didn’t do - it is instead this presumption that has crept into the debate that sexual relations demand some basis of equality. In this case, economic equality.

It seems nowadays, at least in some circles, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man of even comparatively modest means to enjoy life’s basic pleasures. The argument seems to be that if you are having a casual sexual relationship with a person who is better off than you are then automatically you are being exploited.

The issue of consent doesn’t enter into it. The theory seems to run along the lines that one person’s comparative wealth must inevitably – like some human form of ‘lamping’ - dazzle the other person into volitional paralysis.

But why stop at economic inequality? There is no end to the inequalities potentially available in human relationships. What, say, of differences of class or intelligence or education? Are those with only a second-level education - or no education at all - to be ring-fenced from the attentions of those with university degrees?

No doubt, at this point, some those most vehement in the debate are - like stock Victorian fathers - muttering about the matter of one’s ‘intentions’. But intentions are old hat, now. We live in the era of relationships and one night stands and, to paraphrase (in the interests of getting printed) Erika Jong, the ‘zipless sexual encounter.’ In that sense, it strikes me that the debate to date has engendered a great deal of hypocrisy.

Leaving the matter of Cathal O Searcaigh aside for the moment, the general point I am trying to make is that if people today want to be regarded as independent and liberated, then it must be taken as given that they are capable of being so, and of using their natural intelligence, despite the blandishments of wealth and power, not to go into places or relationships where they shouldn’t. And if people still get burned, as inevitably they will, then the best one can say, outside of a certain basic sympathy, is: Get on with it! . . .

Yours etc.